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Family reunification

Associate Professor of Law Dr Helena Wray and her Middlesex colleague, Co-Director of the Social Policy Research Centre Eleonore Kofman, consider the latest evidence ahead of the Supreme Court hearing on the minimum income requirement.

Immigration Minister John McCallum says he’s planning on introducing changes in the “next couple of months” that will grant permanent resident status to the sponsored spouses of Canadians, immediately, upon arriving in Canada.

“When spouses come in now, they don’t immediately become permanent residents; there’s a two-year period where they are not yet permanent residents,” Mr. McCallum (Markham-Thornhill, Ont.) said in an interview with The Hill Times. “We said in our platform that we will end that so that they will become permanent residents on arrival.”

Under the EU citizens’ Directive, currently EU citizens can bring with them to another Member State their spouse or partner, the children of both (or either) who are under 21 or dependent, and the dependent parents of either. This applies regardless of whether the family members are EU citizens or not. No further conditions are possible, besides the prospect of a refusal of entry (or subsequent expulsion) on grounds of public policy, public security or public health (on which, see below).

In principle EU law does not apply to UK citizens who wish to bring non-EU family members to the UK, so the UK is free to put in place restrictive rules in those cases (which it has done, as regards income requirements and language rules). However, the CJEU has ruled that UK citizens can move to another Member State and be joined by non-EU family members there, under the more generous rules in the EU legislation.

One of the issues the Supreme Court may examine is whether the foreign spouse’s income might count towards the threshold. At present, some low-earning British expatriates have trouble moving back from abroad with their foreign spouse, even if that partner is a high earner. The court has the power to declare these rules unlawful, though that is unlikely, believes Ms Grant. In the absence of many other ways of reducing immigration, the government will want to cling on to the strict new rules, for better or worse.

Mixed marriages have always had an ambiguous and often problematic relationship with the law. On one hand, mixed marriages have been seen as a key indicator of sociocultural integration into mainstream society. In terms of the law, this perception has been expressed, for example, as privileged access to citizenship status for immigrant family members of citizens.

According to IPS estimates, non-EU family migration to the UK increased from an average of 35,000 per year in the 1990s to 45,000 in 2013, or 20% of all non-EU immigration that year. These estimates include both dependents and family unification migrants. Family migration, like overall migration to the UK, increased from 1997 to the mid-2000s, peaking at 74,000 in 2006 (see figure 1). Also similar to other categories of migration, family migration declined in the second half of the 2000s. But these shifts in family migration were smaller in magnitude than similar shifts in migration for work or study. As a result of these trends, family migration comprises a smaller share of overall migration now than it did in the 1990s (see our the Migration Observatory briefing on Immigration by Category: Workers, Students, Family Members, Asylum Applicants). Although this briefing focuses on non-EU migration, it is worth noting that, including EU nationals, family migration is now at similar levels to the 1990s. LTIM estimates of family migration were 90,000 in 1991 and averaged 75,000 during the 1990s. LTIM estimates had increased to 105,000 by 2006 but fell to 71,000 in 2013.

3.71 A surprisingly large number of those who attended the detainee forum I organised had been detained because of allegedly sham marriages. Most had been detained after Home Office interviews in Liverpool or Manchester. The questions they said they had been asked by caseworkers to ascertain whether their marriage was a sham included their knowledge of their wife’s National Insurance number, the colour of her underwear, and her bra size. If this was indeed the case, it is questionable whether such questions were either appropriate or useful.

The federal immigration department has said it will be accepting the same number of applications this year as it did in 2015 from parents and grandparents wanting to join family members in Canada, despite a Liberal election promise to double the intake “immediately.”